She's 79, but very spry. She was getting on a bus with a very high step and fell down. She didn't hurt herself, thank goodness, but she did bump the back of her hand, like on the knuckle, on something. But the skin wasn't even broken.

Well, apparently, she managed to break a little artery without breaking the skin. And, of course, she's on blood thinners. So what would be a nasty bruise for you and me turned out to be an ever-growing golfball-sized lump of blood under the skin of the back of her hand. She had to go to the hospital to have the semi-clotted blood kind of squeezed out of a tiny incision. Her entire hand, from the wrist to the finger tips, is now puffy, but what's worse is that it is as black as midnight (from the worst bruise in the universe). It's fine, really, and doesn't even hurt anymore, but it just looks like it's about to drop right off. Blacker than any bruise you've ever had, even though that's all it is in reality.

When DD was just a tiny thing, STBXH was changing her and I heard a "HON! HELP!" from the baby's room. I went racing in to find poop EVERYWHERE. On him, the baby, the changing table, the crib, the wall, the shades... just as he removed her diaper she had the worst case of explosive diarrhea ever. Took forever to clean it up. *makes face*

When I worked at the Pet Store our then-manager accepted a litter of 10 German-shepherd cross puppies, all with watery diarrhea, a week before Christmas, knowing full well that I would be going in by myself on Christmas Day and Boxing Day to look after them. We already had a couple of other puppies too. Let's just say that I have never seen so much poop in my life. (running down the outside of the kennels and puddling on the floor, etc.)

I still say that if you can picture it in your head I've cleaned it up....

This thread reminded me of this story my grandmother would tell from time to time from when she was younger and probably explains why I can find disgusting things amusing. As long as it isn't me.

There was a married couple who had some issues. Namely that husband would get drunk after work, come home late after the wife had gone to bed, vomit into the kitchen sink, then pass out somewhere in their home. Tired of dealing with the icky mess first thing in the morning, and numerous arguments with the husband, the wife finally decided on a method to get her husband to stop puking into her sink. One night after cleaning out a chicken for dinner, she saved the innards rather than throwing them out. Before she went to bed, she tossed the guts into the sink and went to bed.

The next morning she gets greeted by her husband who promised to change his ways. The reason? He thought he threw up so hard, he puked up his guts, so he took a spoon and swallowed them back down...

Many, many years later, I found out from my grandfather that it wasn't a particularly sick joke on my grandmother's part. It really happened, the couple in question were my grandparents.

The last flat I lived in before coming back to London was almost right on the banks of a canal, obviously teeming with wildlife. I have three cats. Go figure.

Leo, my cute little black long-hair who has the biggest yellow eyes in the world and looks as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, set about systematically picking off the local wildlife, seemingly one by one. His favourite trick was to bring a mouse into my bedroom in the middle of the night. I'm quite a light sleeper, and discovered that there's nothing quite as gross as waking up to the sound of "crunch....crunch...crunch..." - but not quite waking up enough to do anything about it. Come the morning, I'd get out of bed, forgetting what had happened in the night, to be faced with the left-overs - a mouse's head, staring up at me from the carpet. After this started happening every.single.night, I kinda got used to it.

I once got up to find a rat in the middle of my living room floor. I don't mind rats - I actually think they're very cute. When they're alive. But this one was dead. It had ceased to be, it was an ex-rat < /python>. And it was MASSIVE. First thing in the morning, I was feeling a little fragile, so I set about trying to find something in the kitchen to 'scoop' it up with - the best I could do was a bucket and a mop, the plan being to sort of 'tip' the rat into the bucket, take it outside and chuck it back down by the canal bank. But the rat, although dead, had other ideas... I sort of nudged it with the mop a few times but it would NOT go over the lip of the bucket, preferring instead to sort of roll around the carpet. In the end, after screaming like a big girl a couple of times, I did something really quite gross - i dumped the bucket over the top of it, shut the cats out of the living room, went to work, and dealt with it when I got home. It was just too far a stretch to deal with first thing in the morning.

But that pales into insignificance compared to this: a few days after the rat incident, I saw something BIG scuttle along the skirting board out of the corner of my eye. Another rat, followed quickly by the cat, chasing after it. I tried to get to it before Leo did, but he was too quick for me and picked it up and took it away and a few seconds later, I heard the 'thunk' of the cat flap; as he'd often take his catches back outside, I thought well, that's the end of that then. Until a couple of weeks later, when I started to smell something... odd.

I took out the rubbish. I cleaned the sink and the drains, but still couldn't get rid of the smell, or figure out where it was coming from. Until I followed my nose to the side of the sofa, and then it dawned on me. Down the side of the sofa, I had an old computer stored. Because I'd been doing some work on it, the side was off, and it was open.... it'd been fairly well wedged against the sofa but still with a gap large enough for say, a rat to get through if it wanted to hide from a cat who wanted to play with it...

Oh man. I couldn't deal with that. I couldn't even look. I called my ex, said "please, please come and help me with this" and to his credit, he did. I went in the other room and he dug out the old computer. Inside, was the missing rat, decomposing and sort of welded and stuck to all the bits and pieces of the computer.

Never did get around to fixing it up after that - funny that

Thankfully, since coming back to London a year and a half ago, I haven't had any more 'gifts' - I guess the local foxes/strays have them all first.

Today, I woke up and checked my incisions that are 4 weeks old. One has had a raised red blister on it for about the whole time. There are still stitches in the stupid thing.

I poked at one and for a moment, I thought I was a Vulcan. Man, thick green stuff just started pouring out of the little hole followed by blood.

I called for my DH--this was too good to miss! He wondered if it was going to be followed by an alien bustin' out and eating my head!

I suppose it's better than them having to lance it, but maybe they will anyway. Now it looks angrier than before.

But, honestly, I thought it was cool. Had it been ear wax, I would have been running around screaming. I can handle just about anything except ear wax!

The end of my son's 21st B-day party was pretty bad. He was practically passed out and 6 drunk people carried him to my van. Meaning that they almost dropped him a couple of times and essentially shook him up pretty good.

His coworker helped him into the van and should have gone out the other door. But, no, he went out the way he got in and my son let loose all over him. For the 20 minute ride home, he just sat in the back seat and puked himself silly. It was almost like Team America (if you are familiar with that scene).

Oh, and he had really, really long hair at the time.

My Dh really stepped up that night, stripped him and hosed him down in the shower. Glad I didn't have to do that.

This isn;t really "gross" unless you're like me and think that bone noises are horrible.

My dad spent a weekend driving my cute little bum here, there and everywhere to find a certain book. (A manga series I read) and FINALLY I found the volume I was missing. (Four stores, fifth had it.) well after I paid for it, I danced in the parking lot. Silly? Yes, very. But I did.

Well, I cam down and my ankle wasn't wqilling to catch me, so there was a crunch and i hit the pavement. No big deal, I twist one or the other ankle at least once every two weeks. (They be weak little chicken ankles... they never break, but the sprain easily.... in this case though, i just hobbled for a few days.)

I used to work with a nurse who had worked several years in a pediatric ER in a teaching hospital. They saw lots of residents; as with any group, most were perfectly fine, but there were a few who thought they were way too good for the rest of the world and the nurses were stupid, incompetent, and barely fit to carry their coffee. When they got a resident like this, they had a standard procedure.

First the nurses would make a nasty 'diaper': they'd take a clean disposable diaper and smear it liberally with chocolate pudding, mustard, ketchup, anything else they could think of, mixed together to produce a nasty mess. Then they'd take it in and show it to the resident in question, asking his opinion - a mom just brought this baby in with terrible diarrhea; the nurses thought it might be a particular disease, what did Doctor think? They'd wave the diaper at the resident, who would usually recoil in horror. Then the nurse would swipe her finger through the mess and sniff it, saying yep, sure smells like <disease>. If a final act was required, she'd then take an inquring lick and remark, wow, definitely tastes like <disease>.

I don't know if this really happened, or if it's a nursing urban legend, but it's a great story anyway!

I was reading an article about a guy who had hundreds of bees living in his walls.

He noticed a strange substance seeping from his walls and he found out it was honey when he tasted it!

I can just imagine the conversation:

"Hey honey, there's some sort of weird stuff oozing out of the wall here.""What do you think it is?""I don't know, should I touch it?""No, don't do that, you don't know what it could be. Let me come and taste it, that'll solve the mystery!"